“Light from the Lake” is a blog about the inspirational people of Our Lady of the Lake University. It is about students who serve their community, alumni who shape the city, faculty and staff who influence the next generation of leaders, and the Congregation of Divine Providence that founded and sponsors OLLU today. It is about a University community that turned a four-alarm fire in 2008 into a catalyst for growth and renewal. The blog is written by Ken Rodriguez, an award-winning journalist and marketer at OLLU and freelance writer.

Note: This is an mySA.com City Brights Blog. These blogs are not written or edited by mySA or the San Antonio Express-News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.

Inspirational Artist

The art of Jesse Trevino hangs in the Smithsonian. His story belongs on the silver screen: Boy wonder artist from the West Side gets blown 50 feet in the air from an exploding booby trap in Vietnam. His right painting arm mangled, his right leg broken and bleeding profusely, Trevino lifts his head from a field of mud and beholds a vision of faces from the Barrio.

“If I ever get out of here alive,” he silently vows, “I’m going to paint them.”

Trevino would lose his right arm and learn to paint with his left. Under the guidance of Sisters Tharsilla Fuchs and Ethel Marie Corne at Our Lady of the Lake University, Trevino would refine new skills and complete a 100-foot mural, “La Historia Chicana,” the first grand work with his left hand.

Almost 40 years later, the mural enjoys a prominent place on the second floor of the Sueltenfuss Library. Sunday, in the shadow of the library, Trevino returns to his alma mater (BA ‘74) an honorary co-chair of “Best of the West,” an inaugural Fiesta event that celebrates the art, music and food of the West Side.

“It is important to me to be connected to people who were here when I attended school and people who are here now celebrating Fiesta,” Trevino says. “I did the first official Fiesta poster in 1981. So when it comes to Fiesta, I feel like a very big part of it.”

Trevino will share “Best of the West” co-chairing duties with TV producer and fellow OLLU graduate Cassandra Lazenby (BA ‘06). “Best of the West” will feature traditional Fiesta fare — cascarones, great food and music — but with shorter lines, a big splash of art and the sound of mariachis. Proceeds go to student scholarships.

“Best of the West” will showcase many fine musicians and artists, but none that matches Trevino’s genius or dramatic narrative. Even his birth sounds surreal. Trevino once told an interviewer from the Archives of American Art Oral History Program that he was born “in a little shack” on Christmas Eve 1946 in Monterrey, Mexico.

“It had a dirt floor, just like in the movies,” he said. “… what they tell me is that I came down the chimney. We didn’t have a chimney, we had an opening — it was like a thatched roof — that I came down and that’s why I was dark.”

That’s what his mother told him, anyway, and he believed her. Trevino grew up with nine brothers and three sisters and a father who drove a truck. When he was 4, Trevino moved with his family to the West Side of San Antonio.

He began drawing cartoons on the walls of a rented home on Monterey Street. His mother rebuked him and made young Jesse remove his sketches with soap and water. He won his first art contest at 7 at the Witte Museum.

“Everybody was clapping and I had goose bumps,” Trevino told the Oral Art History interviewer. “I remember looking up and saying, ‘Ha ha, this is what I want to do. This is the way I want to feel.’”

He won a scholarship to an art school in New York. There he learned under the great portrait artist William F. Draper and met Salvador Dali. Trevino recalls Dali arriving to the school in a taxi, grabbing a piece of plaster and raising it over his head. “This is what I think about art,” Dali said. He threw the plaster onto the ground, where it smashed into pieces, then got into his taxi and left.

“It was really weird,” Trevino told the interviewer. “But I mean, he used to do a lot of weird things.”

Dali was an eccentric master, known for painting surrealist images, such as melted clocks in “The Persistence of Memory.” Trevino is master with a prosthetic right arm, known for painting photo-realistic images, such as a snow cone vendor in, “La Raspa.”

Dali made you think. Trevino makes you feel. Art is a gift he’s given back to his people. With one hand and 70 colors, he painted more than 150,000 ceramic tiles. Out of them, he fashioned a guardian angel, a young boy and a dove. Called “Spirit of Healing,” the mural towers like a vision, 90-feet high, on the face of Christus Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital.